Improving the performance of a web system involves knowledge of how the entire technology stack operates and interacts. There are many simple and common tips that can provide immediate improvements for a website. Some examples include:

• Using a CDN for assets
• Compressing content
• Making fewer requests (web, cache, database)
• Asynchronous management
• Optimizing your SQL statements
• Have more memory
• Using SSD’s for database servers
• Updating your software versions
• Adding more servers
• Configuring your software correctly
• … And the general checklist goes on

Understanding where to invest your energy first, knowing what the return on investment can be, and most importantly the measurement and verification of every change made is the difference between blind trial and error and a solid plan and process. …

Join 29,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. Can RDS worsen an outage ?? That’s another way to think about this question. In my experience, it very clearly increases outages, by tying one or both hands behind your back. Believe me when I say, that is terribly frustrating when you’re putting out fires! […]

Join 29,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. Oh RDS, you offer such promise, but damn it if the devil isn’t always buried in the details. Diving into a recent project, I’ve been looking at upgrading RDS MySQL. Major MySQL upgrades can be a bit messy. Since the entire engine is rebuilt, queries […]

Join 28,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. Amazon is rolling out new database offerings at a rapid clip. I wondered Did MySQL and Mongodb just have a beautiful baby called Aurora? That was last month. Another that’s been out for a while is the data warehouse offering called RedShift. 1. old-fashioned SQL […]

Amazon recently announced RDS Aurora a new addition to their database as a service offerings. Here’s Mark Callaghan’s take on what’s happening under the hood and thoughts from Fusheng Han. Amazon is uniquely positioned with RDS to take on offerings like Clustrix. So it’s definitely worth reading Dave Anselmi’s take on Aurora. Join 28,000 others […]

As of today, Continuent is part of VMware. We are absolutely over the moon about it.

You can read more about the news on the VMware vCloud blog by Ajay Patel, our new boss. There’s also an official post on our Continuent company blog. In a nutshell the Continuent team is joining the VMware Cloud Services Division. We will continue to improve, sell, and support our Tungsten products and work on innovative integration into VMware’s product line.

So why do I feel exhilarated about joining VMware? There are three reasons. 

1.     Continuent is joining a world-class company that is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions. Even …

I was talking with Todd Hoff recently over at High Scalability about a trend I’ve seen of late. ME: I really liked this post by Zoli Kahan from Clay.io.  AWS, cloudflare, docker, haproxy, mysql, mongo, memcache, ansible.  They use just about every technology being talked about these days.   Todd: Yah, that’s why I asked […]

Join 27,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. I was shocked to find this article on ReadWrite: The Truth About DevOps: IT Isn’t Dead; It’s not even Dying. Wait a second, do people really think this? Truth is I have heard whispers of this before. I was at a meetup recently where the […]

Like a lot of developers I started using a MacBook Pro around the time of Tiger.  I instantly loved it:  simple, fast, and virtually no system administration overhead. The genius of OS X was that it never got in the way. You opened the box, pulled out the machine, and got to work. It had a great user interface, excellent  development tools (Eclipse in my case) and the command utilities like ssh, rsync, and bash worked seamlessly with Linux systems.

Well, that was then and this is now. Starting with Lion I began to spend an increasing amount of time fighting OS X instead of getting work done. I'm now using Mavericks and have not seen much improvement, in fact quite the contrary. Here are just a few of the problems after the Lion to Mavericks upgrade:

• Spotlight indexes destroyed; need 2 days to regenerate
• AppleMail access to Gmail IMAP  broken
• Time Machine stuck in …

Join 6100 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. The Foundation of Speed All servers use disk to store files. Operating system libraries, webserver & application code, and most importantly databases all use disk constantly. So disk speed is crucial to server speed. [mytweetlinks] [quote] Disk speed is crucial for MySQL databases. It has [...]